December 14/15: “Jerusalem”, Blake/Perry, Royal Albert Hall

It snowed all day here yesterday, and there’s been just as much snow, unusually, in Jerusalem.

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Which handily if somewhat clumsily gives me an opportunity to post about the Anglican hymn “Jerusalem,” which I only vaguely knew until I sang in an Anglican church choir in university. The poem by William Blake is beautiful, though it is still baffling to me how this became a standard hymn for church services: Satanic Mills, really? And where is God in this hymn?

Dylan and I won tickets to a Last Night at the Proms concert at the Anglican cathedral downtown a couple of years ago. It was like a ticket to secret parallel Anglophile world. (You can’t see them, but they’re all around you.) The program for the concert had an ad for a dating service to meet other Anglophile people, which would explain how they all manage to find each other. There were four encores — four! — of “Land of Hope and Glory,” and we were some of the only people who hadn’t brought a Union Jack to wave. We did enjoy singing “Jerusalem” with a big crowd, though, and it’s got to be even more fun to do this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoV4yrxCfVg